Elections New York City

Cuomo Allies Pour Money Into Race Against Lindsey Boylan

A super PAC has spent six figures on the race over the last week — more than all the candidates had raised as of last month, combined.

Nick Garber · April 27, 2026

The outside spending uses a pass-through entity that allows the super PAC to not include its donors’ identities on its printed materials. | Ad images: New York Campaign Finance Board; Money photo: Engin Akyurt/Canva | Illustration: New York Focus

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With the election just a day away, a New York City Council race has seen a surge of outside spending over the past week from a super PAC tied to allies of former governor Andrew Cuomo — and whose treasurer is a sitting member of the city’s Board of Elections.

The six-figure spending is meant to defeat Lindsey Boylan, a former aide who was the first person to publicly accuse the ex-governor of sexual harassment and is now running in the April 28 special election for the District 3 City Council seat on Manhattan’s West Side. It came days after Mayor Zohran Mamdani endorsed Boylan just over a week ago. (A state attorney general’s report corroborated Boylan’s allegations. Cuomo has denied them and disputed the report.)

The super PAC Westside Progress reported spending $144,500 starting last week on ads, texts and phone calls supporting Carl Wilson, who was former Councilmember Erik Bottcher’s chief of staff and has much of the establishment support in the race. That’s more than the race’s four candidates had raised combined as of last month. Westside Progress has received most of its own funding from yet another super PAC, called Next NYC, which kicked in $175,000 last week.

Next NYC’s donors are not listed on the city’s campaign finance website, but disclosures filed with the state show that the group has received $233,000 from 12 people. Eight of those people donated money last year to either Cuomo’s campaign or the super PACs that supported him. They include Jennifer Bayer Michaels, Cuomo’s longtime campaign fundraiser who gave $5,000 to the new group; Luciana Fato, a corporate lawyer who donated $40,000; and Amanda Eilian, an investor who gave $25,000.

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Next NYC was registered last month by Greg Goldner, a Chicago-based operative who was Cuomo’s general election campaign manager. Jewish Insider reported that the group aimed to support centrist candidates against left-wing contenders backed by Mamdani and the Democratic Socialists of America.

The District 3 race has become a proxy battle between the city’s socialist and establishment forces. Boylan is a member of DSA but does not have the group’s formal support. Wilson, meanwhile, is being backed by City Council Speaker Julie Menin and a wide range of other elected officials and unions. (The United Federation of Teachers is the other main donor to Westside Progress, the pro-Wilson PAC. Separate PACs for the teachers’ and carpenters’ unions have also spent in support of Wilson, while the Working Families Party’s PAC has backed Boylan.)

“Lindsey Boylan and the DSA will increase taxes, defund the police, and, as we grapple with encampments and street drug use on the West Side, they want to legalize all hard drugs, including heroin and fentanyl,” reads the script of a digital ad paid for by Westside Progress. (DSA called for decriminalizing drugs in a pre-2022 platform; Boylan’s campaign platform includes no such pledge.)

The Next NYC PAC is playing a middle-man role: collecting donations from individuals and then funneling them to Westside Progress to be spent in the election. That has the effect of obscuring the donors’ identities — in a printed disclosure, the materials distributed by Westside Progress list its top donor only as the Next NYC PAC.

“This is a clear and flagrant conflict of interest and one that should not be permitted, full-stop.”

—Grace Rauh, Citizens Union

A similar practice was used last year by a business-backed group called Put NYC First, which raised nearly $9 million to support Cuomo and then transferred the money to other super PACs to be spent. That pass-through setup, which made it harder to identify donors, has been criticized by watchdogs including good-government group Citizens Union, whose executive director, Grace Rauh, called the latest example “deeply alarming.”

“We can require that the public knows who is spending these eye-popping sums of money,” said Rauh, who argued that the city’s Campaign Finance Board should require more detailed disclosures about underlying donors to each super PAC.

Goldner, the treasurer of Next NYC, referred comment to Marc Landis, the treasurer of Westside Progress. Landis said in a statement that his group “has one mission: electing strong, progressive Democrats who share our values and are focused on delivering results for our community.”

“We are soliciting resources broadly, and look forward to victory tomorrow night and in the coming months. We are investing in reaching voters where they are, and building a grassroots infrastructure to tackle the critical issues facing our neighborhoods,” said Landis, a Manhattan lawyer.

Notably, Landis is also one of eight commissioners on the city’s Board of Elections. Weeks before he registered the Westside Progress PAC in mid-April, Landis actively participated in a March 10 board meeting and opposed a ballot challenge that had been filed by a supporter of Boylan’s.

In that meeting, Landis spoke up to oppose a motion to boot another candidate in the race — Layla Law-Gisiko — from the ballot because her independent party line contained the phrase “NYC,” which is not allowed under election law. A supporter of Boylan’s campaign had filed that challenge.

Landis did not respond to questions about his role at the Board of Elections. A BOE spokesperson did not immediately respond to questions about whether Landis should have recused himself.

Rauh, of Citizens Union, called the dual role unacceptable.

“It is outrageous that a top election official responsible for oversight of election administration in Manhattan is serving as the treasurer of a super PAC supporting a candidate in a race they are supposed to be overseeing,” Rauh said. “This is a clear and flagrant conflict of interest and one that should not be permitted, full-stop.”

Besides Wilson, the Westside Progress PAC also intends to spend in support of Stephanie Ruskay, who is running in the June Democratic primary for the Upper West Side State Assembly seat being vacated by Micah Lasher, according to state filings. Her opponent, Eli Northrup, has the backing of progressive groups like the Working Families Party.

Among those involved with Westside Progress is Scott Stringer, the former city comptroller and mayoral candidate, who has been raising money for efforts to support more moderate Democratic candidates. In an interview, Stringer did not directly address his role with the group, but called it “committed to supporting strong liberal candidates.”

“I’m very supportive of it,” he said.

Update 4/28: This story was updated to note that Andrew Cuomo has denied Lindsey Boylan's allegations of sexual harassment.